Financial Fitness
My plan for this quarter was for us to pay off my credit card debt, pay half of our Christmas sinking fund, fully pay the car repair sinking fund, have quarter of our four months savings paid, have paid into my pension every month, and researched additional incomes.
I did manage to pay off my credit card and fully paid our car repair sinking fund. As for the Christmas sinking fund, we decided that due to the way our finances are going we should fully pay this off this quarter rather than spread it out over the first half of the year. This meant moving money from our fourth months emergency fund to do this which, in turn, meant that we didn't reach out goal in this front either. However this means we only need to concentrate on this for the rest of the year. I also managed to put money into my pension every month, just not as much as I had hoped. Once our finances are in a better place then I'll increase the amount I'm paying in to hopefully make up for this.
For the next three months I would like us to save up half of our four months savings, though that is going to be a real stretch with our low income and increasing cost of living. I would also like to pay up my six months worth of pension with the additional payments made. Again this might be a bit difficult. Lastly, I want to think more about what I could activity do as a secondary income.
Sailing Around the World
We're taking this goal pretty slowly as we can only really jump on it once we have some finances to, but it's good to keep it fresh in our minds and as a motivation for everything else we're doing. We've found out about where we can get sailing lessons locally and the general cost, which are about £300 to £700 per person depending on what level we go for. We are thinking about the more in-depth, more expensive one as this would give us a better idea as to what we could be letting ourselves in for and whether or not we'd be able to actually do it.
For the next three months I want to research more into what type of boat we might want and would be most suitable for us as a two person crew.
Long Distance Walks
This one was pretty easy. I just added a notebook to my OneNote and then added a whole lot of sections for all the multi-day walks we are interested in doing in the UK. There are some that we're more interested than others, but it's good to keep our options open.
I'm not really going to do much more with this whilst we're still sorting out our earnings etc. But it'll be nice to start planning one soon, even if it's just theoretical for now.
Learning New Skills
Yes well, this one didn't exactly go to plan. We didn't manage to do any skateboarding in the first quarter, but hopefully we'll get some done over this next quarter so I can actually start to get used to it.
As for the surfing, we did research local surf schools we could go to. These are also quite pricey if we went for private lessons, around £100 to £140 per person, though obviously much less if we just book with a group. Depending on how our finances go we might get some lessons in the second quarter, but it's more likely to be later on in the year before we get a chance.
And that's it. Apart from a couple of things, we've done a pretty good job at completing this quarter's goals. I haven't made too many goals for the second quarter as I want to be able to relax for a bit after all the wedding planning. We also don't really know what our finances will be like so we can't make any concrete plans on goals connect with this. If we can do better than I will do more, but otherwise I'm going to aim at low hanging fruit this time. But all in all I'm quite happy with how things are going.
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